Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP • Hacker News Board

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#281

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

HumanOstrich wrote: post #90

pmontra wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can automatically forward mails from that domain to Gmail and find a way to label them. At worst you can write a mail client to do that by logging in, listing mails, mailing them to you and keeping track of what it already sent (sqlite?) They are very well known protocols with plenty of implementations, so probably a LLM can write the code with not much guidance.

Good luck getting consistent delivery to Gmail. Even Cloudflare's email forwarding keeps getting blocked / marked as spam.

I essentially have only forwarded email in my gmail from my personal domain, and it has never been a problem for me.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#282

Post by grapesodaaaaa » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #137

Yeah. Gmail is an anti-pattern. I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP. Fortunately, I own the domain so I pointed it at amazon. I pretty much only use google apps to share docs I've written elsewhere, so I didn't really lose too much when I lost access to apps. It would be much cooler if there were a human I could talk to to find out what…

I’ve had this happen to numerous friends.

Haven’t you heard? The best way to contact gmail support is by posting about it on tech websites /s

It’s sad that I often see resolutions happen here after an engineer scrolls through the comments. I agree that not having backups and your own domain is asking for trouble the way things are currently structured with online mail.

I will say that I hosted my own servers for years, but it’s a lot of trouble and not for everyone (plus, I could never quite get the spam filtering tweaked how I wanted).

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#283

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #161

Well, I'm that Gmail user who used POP3 fetching from my previous email from day 1 of using Gmail. I guess I'll have to set up IMAP then, at least until the time they'll take it away, too.

I would replace POP with forwarding unless you are okay with storing your email in multiple services.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#284

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

anty wrote: post #181

Is there any solution that does not require me to run my own email server? I have a 2GB email server. I use POP to regularly import the mails into Gmail. This deletes the mails on my limited-storage-server. I already pay for Google storage. I do not want to pay (more) for another email server just so I can keep all my emails forever. Forwarding mails does not work, because Gmail quietly drops mails. They don't even p…

Forwarding is the right solution, but it needs to be at a lower level than a regular user style email forward - more like a DNS delivery change.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#285

Post by nla » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 2:58 PM UTC

The Google enshitification continues unabated.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#286

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:00 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #42

What in the world was "Gmailify"? Was it different from adding third-party accounts via POP? (Was it maybe just IMAP for third-party accounts?)

I think it was adding third party accounts via POP but automated for large well known third parties.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#287

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

herczegzsolt wrote: post #10

This will be a major inconvenience for migrating mail accounts. I used the POP feature a lot to get mails from one account to the other without requiring a client to do the dirty work. A migration is still possible, but needing to keep a client up and running to push up mails via IMAP will be a major painpoint.

Google has an email migration feature useful for one time migration.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#288

Post by dwayne_dibley » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #135

teo_zero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible On the other hand, they are also very motivated to have a large mass of data to train their AI. Which of the two motivations wins, is debatable. Today I'd bet on AI.

Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.

Would you really put it past them? Gmail is after all a free service.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#289

Post by NetMageSCW » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:03 PM UTC

metadat wrote: post #102

I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.

POP doesn’t do push, only pull, and it seems that gmail will still support clients using POP.

There is no chance another email service will get any chunk of Internet email if it has to charge for services.

Re: Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

#290

Post by burnte » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

Dennip wrote: post #209

jsheard wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP. I used to pay for Workspace and left because a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts, or were held back for a year or more after free Google accounts got them. It's a mess. Then they kept increasing the price for good measure, and there's no off…

This is a super annoying quirk, lots of things don't work well if you're using workspace as a normal gmail account, and they don't quite warn you up front.

I had to admin Google Workspace maybe 9-10 years ago. It was rough but I thought they'd beep refining it. I'm back in a company using GW and I swear to god it's gotten worse. The basic features that simple don't exist are boggling. It is not a serious product and I feel bad for companies that have to use it. I've been here three months and I'm already planning our migration away.